An amazing group of teachers just spent the week at Cooper-Hewitt, participating in our on-going City of Neighborhoods program for educators. This year, the museum invited around forty teachers from New Orleans to take part in a week-long study of how design can work in the classroom, with a focus on exploring one’s local community. (This team did their work in Chinatown, a neighborhood recovering, like New Orleans, from disaster.)

What better way to share design thinking than through teachers and classrooms? Our guests from New Orleans represent all subject areas—not just art but science, social studies, language arts, and more. The museum’s goal in bringing design education to schools is not to recruit young people to become professional designers (although some of our other programs are geared that way), but rather to help them use design in all aspects of thinking and living.

See how you or your community could be using design in the classroom at Cooper-Hewitt’s Educator Resource Center. Now that’s a democratic view of design.